Pile by the Bed reviews Wild Place by Christian White – a dark, twisty descent into the suburbs when a teenager goes missing in the late 1980s.

Pile By the Bed lists the Top 5 crime fiction novels of 2019 and 5 more honourable mentions

Pile by the Bed reviews The Wife and the Widow by Christian White, the follow up to his award winning debut The Nowhere Child and describes it as another page-turning stand alone thriller.

Pile By the Bed’s Top 5 crime fiction books for 2018 with 5 honourable mentions

The Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award has been discovering some of Australia’s favourite authors. Some recent recipients include Jane Harper’s The Dry and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project. So when Christian White’s manuscript titled Decay Theory picked up the award in 2017, publishers sat up and took notice. And for good reason. Now renamed the more catchy The Nowhere Child, White’s novel is an assured crime thriller with a well constructed mystery at its heart. The hook for The Nowhere Child comes early and hits hard and sustains any bumps in the narrative. In Melbourne, 30 year-old photography teacher Kim Leamy is approached by an American stranger. He tells her that she is actually Sammy Went, abducted as a two-year old from her home in the small town on Manson, Kentucky 28 years before. This mystery of how a two year old American girl ended up in suburban Melbourne in 1990, living a seemingly normal, well adjusted life, unravels slowly in chapters alternating between 1990 and the present day. Kim’s mother died four years before, taking her secrets with her and her stepfather, who had come on the scene after she was born, knows something but is not talking. Kim…